Sunday, May 25, 2014

What's Old Is New

I’m
president of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society, located in center city
Philadelphia for the last 175 years or so. I like working in the city, although
I also like living in the suburbs—it keeps my professional life and my personal
life separate.

But when an
important developer came to me and asked me to check out the history of a site
he hoped to build on out in Chester County (definitely the suburbs) to make sure
he wouldn’t run into some nasty surprises, I couldn’t say no. I figured that if
I did him a favor, he might return it. From everything I’d heard, he was a fair and honest man.

So together
we went out to the site for a tour—and found a body floating in a pond. That
was the first surprise. It’s still not quite clear why I became involved in
figuring out why the man was dumped there, but as it turned out, it all came
back to the history of the place, so in the end I was the right person.

Since we’re
coming up on Memorial Day, I should mention that a park only a couple of miles
from the developer’s land includes one of the oldest war memorials in the
country: it commemorates the Battle of Paoli, often called The Paoli Massacre,
which took place in 1777. If you learned in your high school history classes
that the British in the Revolutionary War were gentlemen wearing snappy red
uniforms who fought in straight lines and wondered why the colonists didn’t
play by those rules, this particular battle would change your mind fast. The
British attacked by night, using sabers and bayonets, and caught the colonial
soldiers by surprise—and there were a lot
of casualties. Ironically, it helped the American side because everybody was
horrified by the British attack—very ungentlemanly.

The 1817 Monument

The 1877 Monument

What’s that
got to do with the developer’s building site? There are a few more surprises
there. And you’d find out that history is far from dead—it’s still a part of
our daily lives.

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